ROBERT ABEL, from Edinburgh, has set up schools, delivered health programmes and ran his own safari camp since moving to Africa more than 20 years ago.

Robert Abel plans to spend Christmas with his wife Evelyn, and children Caroline and Jonathan

ROBERT ABEL will sit down to a dinner of fish and chips this Christmas.

With his wife Evelyn and children Caroline, three, and Jonathan, four, he will have grilled mukeke with perhaps a little green banana, and some fresh pineapple to follow.

Evelyn’s large family will join them at their home, a haven of tranquillity, in Bujumbura, capital of the Eastern African state of Burundi.

Flowers and ivy cover the walls and toys lie on the lawn, just like any other household – except we are sitting outside in December under an awning and chatting, sipping cold drinks and swatting the odd fat fly.

“I came out here in April 2003 and four days later there were mortars coming down into the town,” said Robert.

“The rebels just sat up in the hills above us and they’d chuck one into the city centre and bang a few houses here and there but mercifully not a lot of people were hurt.

“There was street fighting for about three or four weeks. The rebels came down from the hills but they were young boys and the troops just knocked them out.

“Being a mzungu – or a white man – definitely helped because they understood I was neutral and I could get about without too many problems.

“Kanyosha, the area where we now live, was quite badly affected. Rebuilding is haphazard but it is getting there.

“At one time, the politicians and the government troops just could not come in here. But then it all stopped. They had talks, everyone was happy and things changed. Overnight, the roadblocks came down and you could travel anywhere.

“There are still some niggling little things like the electricity being switched off at night – but you can live with that.”

Robert, from Edinburgh, has been in Africa for more than 20 years. His life has taken him from Kenya to Somalia, Sudan, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Burundi and, most recently, Congo.

He added: “The Somalis are fairly irascible people, a bit irritable, but you just talk to them, talk and then shake hands, then that’s the contract sealed.

“When they go into the market to buy guns, they shoot them in the air to try them out and then they say, ‘I’ll take this one’.”

Robert laughs. He has – miraculously perhaps – lived through and helped out in some of the worst conflicts in Africa.

He has set up schools, delivered health programmes and, for a while, even ran his own safari camp. He laughs at the title of international consultant sometimes given to him because of his ability to source and deliver hundreds of tents, for example, for thousands of people suddenly displaced through disasters – natural and man-made.

He said: “You get to be an expert in managing projects in the middle of nowhere. Look what happened in the 90s? Ethiopia was overthrown, Somalia, the Sudan war was still going – they had refugees coming out of their ears in the north of Kenya.

“There were 400,000 refugees at the eastern border at Garissa, Liboi and Dadaab. And there were 300,000 to 400,000 from Ethiopia where the government were overthrown.

“We set up two camps on the Somali border with Kenya and one at Daadab which is still running. Because of the famine, all the Somali refugees have come back in there. We set up camps for the United Nations Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) then after that, Mogadishu kicked off and we were brought in to run 11 houses.

“The American troops came in there in December because the supplies were being looted. I was sitting watching them – all the Somalis had gone back into the cafes.

“And the Americans were crawling up the beach along the sand thinking they were going to get shot at and they were met by CNN cameramen who were already there. ‘Hello, smile for the guys back home’. They had come in ahead of them to film them arriving.

“And then Rwanda blew up and 500,000 went south into Tanzania and about one million north into Goma and we were called in again by UNHCR to west Tanzania, which is still there.”

The crises and the tragedies roll off his tongue. Here in the UK, they were items on the news programmes. Robert Abel lived through them all.

But it is in the area of humanitarian aid that he has ploughed most of his energy – in emergency help first of all and then long-term support afterwards, creating and managing programmes such as those run by SCIAF, Scotland’s biggest international aid agency.

Robert has survived years of conflict and tragedy in Africa

That means opening up agricultural projects, counselling services, offering seed programmes and health services to empower people so they can support themselves and their families. He said: “I like the kind of work SCIAF is doing. It is very important. It is like the work I was doing here after the civil war.

“We were doing repatriation and farming projects and unwittingly carrying out reconciliation programmes between the Tutsis and the Hutus who had previously been killing each other.

“When they were together on a farm, they just had to get on with it.

“We were sponsoring little welding shops, sewing groups for girls, helping the fishing industry to get back on its feet.”

Robert has recently joined MAG, the Manchester-based Mines Advisory Group, spending weeks at a time in Brazzaville in the Congo – one of the most explosive countries in Africa.

While Burundi and Rwanda have settled down, Congo is still a badland with atrocities and fighting on a regular basis.

Yet Robert is still hopping on and off planes and padding quietly into these hotspots. In 2002, he was in Goma in July helping those who had lost everything when the volcano Mount Nyiragongo erupted six months earlier.

While he was there, it rained for the first time and to everyone’s astonishment, the earth began to steam.

The ground was cool enough to walk on the surface, but beneath it was still red hot. More recently he has been in Brazzaville from where he returned just in time for Christmas.

“It’s something else there,” he said. “They try to mirror Paris in a way with boulevards 200 metres wide in the middle of the jungle and ministry buildings as big as the Hilton Hotel. God knows who paid for them.

“A huge arms depot blew up on March 4 this year. It flung armaments into the community. Houses were flattened in a radius of one-and-a- half kilometres.

“I reckon 400 people were killed – it was like an atomic bomb going off. The armaments belonged to the government and the explosion was caused by an electrical fault.

“We were sent in to clear up. There were houses, tanks, munitions all over the place. The mess was unbelievable and the devastation was incredible.

“We were the first group on the ground because we had been doing de-mining around the airport. We have been digging stuff up every week from the blast and then taking it north to a remote area where we dig a big hole, put it in and blow it up.”

It has meant weeks away from Bujumbura, which Robert now considers home. At the gate, he points the way to his nearest pub frequented by him and the local chief no less.

“I am the only mzungu here,” he said. “And I won’t go back to Scotland to live.

“There are some things I miss – particularly the frosty mornings. I would give a week of Burundian sunshine for that. And I miss McEwan’s Export.

“I have been in Africa for more than half my life I reckon. I would have been back in 2010 for my father’s funeral but that volcano in Iceland blew up and I couldn’t get out.

“Dad had left directions his ashes were to be scattered on the River Tay so once the planes were flying again, I went over and my sister and I travelled north to carry out his wishes.

“We had a wee ceremony and even got a piper. Extraordinary really. It’s a strange life.”